firebird

Firebird 3 was released almost a year ago and it has already got two minor releases. But there is still no official packages for MacOS. So this post is about my humble attempt to build it on MacOs from source code. Most of the instructions are taken from Paul Beach’s Firebird Devel list post or from his blog.

This area is not my expertise so there may be inefficient or even wrong approaches so use it on your own risk and any suggestions, corrections and improvements are always welcomed.

When building needed libraries and Firebird source code, my working directory was /Users/ct/prj so when you see these directory in code blocks below you have change it to your working directory name.

First we should stop firebird service if it is installed:

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sudo launchctl unload/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.firebird.gds.plist

Building ICU

Firs step is downloading and building ICU library. I’ve used version 54.1, but I think more recent versions can also be used without problem. After downloading and extracting ICU, we have to modify icu/source/config/mh-darwin config file

Installing

At this point you should have compiled binaries in gen/Release/firebird directory. As I do not know how to make a pkg file for MacOs I’ve manually copied files to Library/Frameworks folder and made setup operations manually as :

If you have not installed firebird from an official package then your system does not have firebird user and group. To create them we can use copy user creation code from builds/install/arch-specific/darwin/install-script. Let’s create a temp script file :